A Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,--and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.
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When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
When I was being honest with myself, I had to own that there was something about me that was drawing an energy in my life that left me feeling underserved and unfulfilled. I decided to grow. I decided to purge myself of anyone and anything that was not full of goodness, serving me or making me happy.
People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.
In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well... I wasn't entirely alone... It's not possible to sleep alone.
Get into something that's really personal that means something to you, where you have something to say and is something really individualized. I wish I was more aware of that when I started my career instead of doing a few things I was told would be good for me. And they weren't, because it left me empty, so I didn't do a good job anyways. I think that's what's key to what we do: It's got to be personal.
I can only speak for myself but for me imagination and invention cannot generate something more important, more beautiful and more terrifying than the common object, amplified by the attention that we give it. An object alone, in front of me who is alone, exactly in front of me just as I would like to have in front of me someone who really interests me, in a good light to better observe it.
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
A lot of women were betting on me because there were so few role models and I let them down. They had put me on a pedestal. I maybe enjoyed being in that limelight, but I couldn't reverse what I had done.
I suppose people lost interest in me when I left Liverpool; but it wasn't me who left, it was other people who left me. If people had continued to follow me, they would have seen my two good seasons in Turkey which caught the attention of Besiktas and Galatasaray.
You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.
You were honest and hardworking and kind. You were polite and patient and more mature than any guy I’d dated before. And when we were together, you listened in a way that made me feel like I was the only woman in the world. You made me feel complete and spending time with you just seemed right.
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.
Growing up, I didn't have any comic books, at all. But my friend had a trunk full of them, so comic books were like candy for me. I would go over to his house for a sleep-over, and I would just be devouring everything I could get my hands on. I knew the sleep-over was going to be over, and I was going to go back to my house and it was going to be Kipling.
When I was able to get home it first hit me that you had left and I couldn't do anything about it. Every day before that an evening with you was waiting for me after school, now no more, strange feeling. I had grown too accustomed to your warmth. That is also a danger. At home I looked at the notebooks that you had bought and I got the stupidest surge of hope that I'd find something of you, something especially for meant for me. I would so much like to have something of you that I could always keep by me, that nobody else would notice.
You saw me before I saw you. In the airport, that day in August, you had that look in your eyes, as though you wanted something from me, as though you’d wanted it for a long time. No one had ever looked at me like that before, with that kind of intensity. It unsettled me, surprised me, I guess. Those blue, blue eyes, icy blue, looking back at me as if I could warm them up. They’re pretty powerful, you know, those eyes, pretty beautiful, too.
Walking my dogs twice a day provides me with an opening and closing of my day, and I've learned to use those walks for a walking meditation, which had never occurred to me until a friend gave me Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn years ago. It helped me take advantage of moments that already existed in my day and turn them into something more expansive.
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